A few months ago, I wrote a post on document reuse and explained how it can boost your document creation efficiency by 40%, on average. This post provides you a list of my top five document sharing sites where you can find reusable docs of all kinds — invoice templates, study cards, business plan samples, venture capital pitch templates, project management plan templates, graduation announcement templates, balance sheet spreadsheet templates, tournament bracket templates, and so on. There are a lot of so-called “document sharing” sites out there, but not all of them allow you to manipulate the elements (content, structure, style, and rendering) of existing documents fully. The sites that I have listed below do give you full document control, so you don’t have to waste your time re-creating what’s already been created.

Brief description: DocStoc is a document sharing platform and social networking community for professionals. It currently hosts over 12,000 legal, business, and other professional documents that can be searched, previewed, and downloaded for free.

Brief description: Scribd is very similar to DocStoc, except that it’s targeted more toward individual users. Scribd claims that it’s the largest document sharing community with over 17 million people per month viewing documents.

Brief description: Google Docs allows users to share and collaborate around documents. From a document reuse perspective, the Google Docs Templates is of most interest here since it makes hundreds of different templates available for download. These templates were created by Google and others in business community. At some point in the future, Google plans to include user-generated templates.

Brief description: Microsoft Office Online contains hundreds of reusable templates available for download. The site allows users to submit self-created templates and to share with others. Templates are searchable by Collections (e.g., real estate, back-to-school, and travel), by Category (e.g., address books, balance sheets, and itineraries), and other search functions.

Brief description: Gazhoo.com (a Scribd company) is a content marketplace that allows users to search for documents, preview half of the content (via Flashpaper) free of charge, and download in full for a price set by the content creator (the seller). For each transaction, Gazhoo.com extracts a draconian fee of 30%. (Look at this way: it’s better than 40%.)

edocr — The site doesn’t allow users to modify content like Scribd and DocStoc so there are limitations on document reusability. Edocr is most useful for publishers who want to expose their publications prior to release or for businesses who want to generate leads with their sales propaganda. The site’s Community Directory allows you to network with and circulate your documents among users in shared interest groups. You can also use edocr to store your documents online. For more information see “edocr joins Scribd, Docstoc in document sharing” (TechCrunch) or “Share your docs with edocr” (The Tech Brief).

Constant-Content is actually the topic of a future post since it’s a very special class of document reuse. There’s no doubt that sites like it support document reuse. They allow you to purchase unique content outright usually for publication purposes (such as your personal blog) — without the need to tailor whatsoever. Reusing documents in this fashion is by far the most efficient form of reuse — kind of like content on-demand.

Just to clarify the scope of the list above, it’s focused on sites that offer access to pre-made document templates or completed document samples to support some sort of process/activity/task that we carry out on a recurring basis in our personal (e.g., sending out X-mas cards) or professional lives (e.g., project management).

Thanks for mentioning edocr.com. As you have written, we have many types of documents including few templates, but our focus is very much on documents created by companies on their products and services rather than on reusable documents.